Dàjīng yàoyì chāo zhùjiě 大經要義抄注解
Sub-Commentary on the Compendium of the Essential Meaning of the Great Sūtra
(anonymous, medieval Japanese Shingon)
About the work
A single-fascicle sub-commentary on a Compendium of the Essential Meaning of the Great Sūtra (Dàjīng yàoyì chāo 大經要義抄) — a compressed exposition of the Mahāvairocanasūtra (大日經) by Kakuban 覺鑁 or another medieval Shingon authority. The work is anonymous in the Taishō edition.
Abstract
Authorship. Anonymous. The catalog meta also records no author. Modern Shingon-school scholarship has not been able to identify the sub-commentator with confidence; the parent text Dàjīng yàoyì chāo itself is attributed in some sources to Kakuban (覺鑁, 1095–1144) and the sub-commentary is conventionally placed in the medieval Shingon scholastic tradition.
Date. Conventionally late Heian to Kamakura period, c. 1100–1300 CE.
Content. The work proceeds line-by-line through the parent Dàjīng yàoyì chāo, opening with the gloss on its first sentence:
“*The 抄 [the parent compendium] says: ‘Person-Dharma uniquely-honoured, teaching-meaning separated from saying.’ Gloss says: ‘Person’ refers broadly to […] the capable-converter and the converted. Within this, the capable-converter Buddha-words are unique […] uniquely-honoured here means that one now enters and awakens to the True Vehicle…”
(抄云。人法獨尊教義離説云云解云。人者廣□□□□化所化。此中能化佛言獨□□□□□□□□□獨尊者。今悟入眞乘之)
The text is partially fragmentary (some characters lost or illegible — marked with □ in the Taishō edition), but the sub-commentary’s method is clear: each phrase of the parent compendium is glossed in extensive doctrinal exposition, drawing on the Mahāvairocanasūtra itself, on Yixing’s 一行 Yìshì commentary, and on Kūkai’s foundational treatises.
Significance. As one of the medieval Shingon scholastic sub-commentaries on the Mahāvairocanasūtra essential-meaning tradition, the work belongs to the broader corpus of Shingon taikyō-gi 大經義 (“Great-Sūtra meaning”) doctrinal literature. The fragmentary nature of the preserved text and the anonymous authorship limit modern scholarly attention, but the work remains a witness to the scholastic-exegetical density of medieval Shingon Mahāvairocanasūtra study.
Translations and research
- No Western-language translation located.
- Ryūichi Abé, The Weaving of Mantra (Columbia, 1999) — for the broader medieval Shingon Mahāvairocana-sūtra commentary tradition.
Links
- CBETA: T77n2440
- Foundational text-tradition: Mahāvairocanasūtra (KR6q0019 T848); Yixing’s Yìshì commentary.